Page 28 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Fourteen

Six weeks earlier

Nothing was working and it had Peter rattled.

In all his years of doing this, he had never met a safe he couldn’t eventually crack with the right tools and a little ingenuity. Even warded safes eventually yielded their secrets to him with enough time and patience.

But this safe wasn’t an ordinary safe. It wasn’t even an ordinary warded safe.

The safe his employers were paying him to crack was a really fucking warded safe.

Peter had tried everything. The lock-picking tools he’d purchased decades ago with his first paycheck. The small hammer he used to knock locks loose when his lock-picking tools failed. The not-so-small hammer that had served him well when he’d been cracking safes in the Baltics in the late 1980s.

All any of it had gotten him for his efforts were a sore thumb and a series of increasingly severe electrical zaps from the wards protecting the safe and its contents.

Whoever this safe belonged to did not want it tampered with. They were also someone with warding skills unlike anything Peter had ever seen.

He would honestly be impressed with them if they weren’t making his life a living nightmare.

Peter didn’t think he was losing his touch, but it was clear that other, less conventional methods were needed.

After I paid our bill, Peter and I made our way to the elevators.

A group of rowdy wedding guests got on with us, forcing us to stand so close together our elbows brushed.

The others were laughing about something that had happened at the reception, but I barely registered anything but the lights on the elevator panel ticking up as we climbed higher, the rapid beat of my heart, and how badly I wanted to hold Peter’s hand again.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to move my hand just a fraction to the right and twine my fingers through his. The urge to do it was so strong I bit the inside of my cheek to ground me—and to remind myself not to do anything stupid.

But would it be stupid? He’d admitted he wanted me. I wasn’t certain when it had started happening, but I realized I wanted him, too. It had nothing to do with the pheromones he’d been throwing off downstairs. Something about this man drew me in and had since the night we’d met.

It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. But perhaps indulging our impulses now would help us get over our feelings before they could bloom into something complicated.

A kiss now to save a massive headache later.

Or something like that.

After what felt like an eternity, the other people got off the elevator. And then we finally arrived at our floor. By the time we’d walked to the end of the hallway and arrived at our suite, I’d made up my mind.

Wordlessly, Peter keyed open the lock. I didn’t think I was imagining the way his hands shook as he opened the door for me, then followed me inside.

It emboldened me, seeing him nervous and just a little bit undone.

I closed the door behind us, then turned to face him. He stood a good ten feet away, his eyes on anything and everything but me.

“Maybe we should just kiss and get it out of our systems,” I said. No point in beating around the bush.

Peter’s eyes snapped to mine, wide with surprise. “ What? ”

I took a deep breath. “I’m feeling…” How did I say this without sounding like a sex-obsessed fool? “ Affected , I guess. By our conversation in the bar.”

His throat worked as he stood there, rooted to the spot. He made no move towards me, gave no sign that my offer was something he wanted.

“Oh,” he said.

Oh?

What did that mean? I hadn’t thought I’d have to work for this. My confidence sagged. “It’s fine if you don’t want to,” I backpedaled, suddenly feeling foolish. “You probably say things like that all the time.”

He frowned. “Things like what?”

Was he really going to make me say it? He had to know what I was talking about. But when he only stood there, waiting for me to clarify, I caved. “The part where you said you wanted me,” I mumbled.

“Oh,” he said again. If there’d been a rapid-blinking vampire competition in the Olympics, Peter would be in the running for the gold. “I…”

By that point, I’d had it. “So did you mean it or not?” I blurted.

His eyes traveled down to my lips and stayed there for the length of a heartbeat. Two. When they met mine again, his had darkened. “I meant it,” he said. “I want you so much I can’t think straight when you’re near me.”

My breath left me. My toes curled in my shoes. I leaned back against the closed door for support, not even realizing I’d done it until my head thunked against the wood.

“Oh,” I murmured, echoing his sentiment from earlier.

He huffed a small laugh, then came a step closer. Another. He leaned in close, resting his arm against the door above my head. His mouth was so close to mine, I felt the cool waft of his breath on my upturned face.

“I want you,” he said again, voice rough. “I just don’t know if I should act on that.”

“Why not?” I asked. I winced at the pleading in my voice. Especially since just moments ago I’d acknowledged to myself that this was probably a bad idea.

“A few reasons,” he said carefully.

Damn his reasons. I wanted to feel his lips on mine.

“It would just be one kiss,” I said. “I won’t ask for anything else. But if I don’t kiss you tonight, I worry that…”

His eyebrow lifted. “What?”

I swallowed. “I worry that I’ll be too distracted to focus on anything else. Because I want you, too.”

There it was.

His eyes blazed. We were so close that if I tilted my chin upward just a fraction, we would be kissing and this discussion would finally be over.

“And you think kissing will remove the distraction,” he murmured.

“Yes,” I said, willfully ignoring the fact that this never worked in romance novels. “Absolutely. One kiss will—”

“Get it out of our systems,” he said, parroting my earlier words.

“You can say no,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t.

He swallowed. “I don’t want to say no.”

“Then why are you fighting it?”

“I don’t want you to regret this later.”

I shook my head. “I won’t.” A thought occurred to me. “Will you?”

“No,” he said immediately. “Definitely not. But you’re wrong about one thing.” He leaned in, tracing the column of my neck with the tip of his nose. His touch was gentle, but electric with promise. “Kissing you won’t even begin to get you out of my system.”

He pulled away from me then, a war flashing in his eyes. Before I could react, before I could say anything more, Peter let out a soft groan.

“Fuck it,” he muttered—then pressed his lips to mine.

Everything I thought I’d known about this situation, everything I believed I’d wanted, flew from my head. The kiss was gentle, a barely there touch of lips that was over almost as soon as it began. It shot through me like wildfire all the same.

When he pulled back, Peter’s eyes were a dark maelstrom of want and torment.

I had no doubt the desire I saw in them was mirrored in my own.

He waited a heartbeat, and then another, scanning my face for my reaction.

When I didn’t push him away—when I wound my arms around his neck to pull him even closer, to urge him to kiss me again—his resolve snapped.

He let out a shaky exhale. Slid his hands up to cup my cheeks like I was something precious.

Then he tilted his head and kissed me.

Oh , I thought.

Yes. This.

Peter kissed me the way a man on the cusp of drowning breathes.

Gasping and desperate. His mouth tasted of the meal he’d drunk before finding me in the bar, of the breath mints he’d probably chewed to cover it up, yet I burned for this.

For him. I was trapped—between the hard lines of his body and the solid wood of the door behind me, between wanting his mouth on mine and the sudden realization that continuing to kiss him like this probably was a terrible idea after all.

“Tell me to stop,” he breathed against my mouth. My heart was jackhammering against my rib cage so loud I barely heard him.

“I don’t want you to stop.” I reached up and wove my fingers into his hair. Gods , it was just as soft as it looked. I tugged on the messy strands, reveling in the broken sound he made in response.

“I have to stop,” he rasped. A moment later he pulled back from me on a quiet groan. “We don’t know who I used to be. Or if you’ll stop wanting me once we do. My heart doesn’t beat anymore, but it can still break.”

The vulnerability in his words touched something inside me I’d thought long dead. With aching tenderness, he untangled my fingers from his hair and placed my hands back down by my sides. Then he gently moved me away from the door.

Without another look at me, he opened it and stepped into the hallway.

“Wait,” I said, confused. “Where are you going?”

“Out.” He hesitated, then half turned until I could see his face in profile. If I thought he’d looked agonized before we kissed, it was nothing compared to how absolutely wrecked he looked now. “It’ll be better for both of us, I think, if I go for a walk.”

I watched him move down the hall towards the elevator. Once he’d disappeared inside it, I slowly closed the door to our room.

It had only been a few moments, but already I missed the press of his mouth on mine.

In the time-honored tradition of people everywhere who’ve just made a colossal mistake in affairs of the heart, I flung myself face down onto my bed. Then I groaned and pulled one of the soft down pillows over my head.

With that kiss I had stupidly instigated, everything between Peter and me had just irrevocably changed.

So much for getting it out of our systems, indeed.

When I walked into our suite’s common room a little later, thinking a minibar snack was just the ticket for dealing with my confusing mess of emotions, Peter was perched on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees.

I stopped short at the sight of him.

Even from a few feet away, I could tell something was wrong.